I have assembled a gallery of images of notable writers. You won’t find Whitman or Hemingway or Shakespeare or Woolf here. Too easy. First person to identify everyone correctly gets a parcel of books. Good luck!
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The Kardashian sisters – Kim, Khloe and Kourtney — are writing a novel and asking fans to help them come up with a title. Now, I probably shouldn’t say this, but they might want to ask fans to just go ahead and write the ENTIRE BOOK, since the sisters’ daily activities never seem to include novel reading or bookstore […]
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Here are the correct match-ups of words and definitions from yesterday’s post about a new book, Thingamajigs and Whatchamacallits: Unfamiliar Terms for Familiar Things. I’ll be trying to work these into everyday conversations, newspaper stories, book reviews… 1. clowder: a group of domestic cats 2. elflock: hair matted as if by elves 3. duff: the […]
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My Steelers lost. But at least we have a winner from last week’s Bookish contest to write a Super Bowl haiku. The honors go to Lisa, whose haiku describes both sides of the Super Bowl scene: Armchair coaches hurl Invectives, hooting calls, while football widows shop. Particularly nice is the shift away from the game […]
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Karl Walter/Getty Troy Polamalu. Go Steelers! A stray reference to Super Bowl haiku on NPR this morning got me thinking. And searching — on Google and elsewhere — to see what tiny football poems I could find. I found a few that followed haiku’s traditional 5-7-5 syllable format, but nothing that blew me away. I […]
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Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Was this what Mary Shelley had in mind? Man, we’ve got some astute readers in this town. Yesterday, I posted a little quiz on final lines of classic novels. Many of you knew ALL the answers. (I confess, I did not. Sigh.) So, I’m impressed. Here are the famous last words, […]
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A gentleman famous for his final words. This is pretty hard, I admit. Most readers can recite a few famous first sentences from a few classic books. (The first sentence to Pride and Prejudice, I would argue, defines perfectly the social issue around which Austen built her brilliant novels.) But what about last sentences? In […]
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Every year around the holidays, I create a list of the best books of the year — books people might want to buy and give as gifts. It’s a fun task, but it also makes me anxious. Most of us have very little time to read, so the last thing I want to do is […]
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